‘We’re the last ones standing’: the ANU researcher helping the forgotten women of Afghanistan

In the years since the Taliban seized Afghanistan, ANU PhD scholar Susan Hutchinson has guided hundreds of women’s rights defenders to safety.

The Taliban had just taken Kabul. The US and allied forces were withdrawing. Crowds formed at the international airport. Hundreds of people ran alongside planes as they taxied down the runway, some even holding onto jets as they took off. 

As images of this frenzied airport chaos were shown across the world, Susan Hutchinson was in Canberra. 

A busy group chat can be hard to follow at the best of times. But as the executive director of Azadi-e Zan, an NGO focused on helping Afghan women’s rights defenders to safety, Hutchinson knew her WhatsApp group had lives on the line. 

The family she was guiding through the exodus process had been given a visa and were trying to meet with an officer from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. All the officer knew about them was that someone in the group was carrying a yellow scarf. 

 “We were all communicating on WhatsApp, but they were still unable to meet,” Hutchinson, a PhD scholar from the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University (ANU), says. 

“As is often the case, women in Afghanistan have caring responsibilities for the elderly and young people, and the scenes at the airport were just not physiologically possible for small children or the elderly to make it through. 

In previous days at the airport, there were confirmed deaths by crushing. The group Hutchinson was coordinating with, which included two toddlers, saw dead bodies as they made their way through the crowd. 

“After an incredibly long, gruelling day trying to get into the airport, I tried to tell them it wasn’t safe to spend the night at the airport, that they needed to go home, because we knew about the threat of a suicide bomb,” Hutchinson recalls. 

At first, the family were reluctant to return to their home, fearing they would miss their opportunity to depart the country. But eventually, they agreed. 

“That meant that they were safe when the bomb went off, but it also meant that they were not able to get into the airport and Australia’s last plane left without them,” Hutchinson says. 

Stolen dreams

Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban, an ultraconservative fundamentalist group, has placed bans on women appearing in public without a male chaperone, and have forbidden girls from obtaining education beyond primary school. With their rights curtailed, the women that remain in Afghanistan live in a nightmarish scenario. 

Soraya Rahmat was a law professor at Alberoni University, north of Kabul, and the head of a pro bono legal clinic focusing on family law. She used to represent women and girls affected by domestic violence and taught workshops on women’s rights. 

But everything changed when Rahmat took on a new case, defending a woman who was attacked by her husband resulting in a deep wound across her face and left ear. Rahmat started to receive frequent calls from the woman’s husband, who had connections to the Taliban, and on one occasion from someone police later identified as a member of ISIS. 

“The first time I was threatened was almost a week after I started working on her case, the beginning of April 2021, when her husband called my office and I picked up,” Rahmat says. 

“After finishing the divorce and gaining the woman custody of her children, I received many calls from the husband and from the Taliban’s address that threatened death.” 

Around this time, Rahmat was also injured in a suicide attack targeting another professor at her university. 

“I rarely went to university and limited my activities – the state of the government was broken and anarchy prevailed. I realised the police also did not have the ability to save citizens,” Rahmat says. 

“With the arrival of the Taliban on 15 August 2021, everything ended and we hid completely.” 

Rahmat’s husband was also in danger because he had worked at Bagram Airfield, the largest of the US military bases, before it fell to the Taliban. The family feared for their lives. The Taliban later issued an arrest warrant for Rahmat. But the family managed to obtain a Pakistani visa at a steep price and fled on New Year’s Eve 2021. 

Hutchinson says this “new normal” for Afghan women is heartbreaking. 

“As an organisation, we at Azadi-e Zan have worked closely with women who remain in Afghanistan – who have been arrested by the Taliban, who have been disappeared by the Taliban, who have been tortured in the most heinous ways possible.” 

She adds that before the Taliban’s return to power, many women had worked and studied hard because they believed they could achieve whatever they set their mind to. 

“We have, in our network, women who have simply had their dreams stolen.” 

Breaking free

Helping women’s rights defenders to leave the country is a multi-step process. As a former member of the Australian Defence Force, Hutchinson draws on her experience with non-combatant evacuations and her extensive advocacy networks. From there, she collates lists of at-risk women and their families, acquires visas and passports, and helps them to travel out of the country and beyond. 

Some families have had to make risky cross-country and cross-border trips through Taliban-controlled checkpoints to neighbouring states – including Pakistan. In these cases, Hutchinson crafted cover stories that would explain the families’ reasons for travel. She even ensured families had plausible items in their car that confirmed their stories. 

Hutchinson estimates that she and Azadi-e Zan have guided more than 320 women’s rights defenders and their families to safety, as well as aiding more than 200 others who worked in other fields. 

But their work is far from done. 

“We have hundreds of people remaining in need of assistance in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. And we’re getting new requests for assistance all the time that we don’t have the capacity to even respond to,” Hutchinson says. 

The long processing times for visas and passports in neighbouring countries have caused new problems. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been forcibly deported from Pakistan since the introduction of the Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan in late 2023. 

“In the early days, there were lots of folks doing this work, and I think we’re the last ones standing.”

Susan Hutchinson

Rahmat spent years in Pakistan waiting to be settled in a safe country. It was at this time that she was introduced to Hutchinson and Azadi-e Zan. 

“She worked hard to expedite our case and to ensure that my children were not deprived of education in Pakistan,” Rahmat recalls. “In late 2023, harassment by the Pakistani police had increased dramatically. With her efforts, the Australian High Commission in Islamabad sent us a police letter and it saved us from deportation to Afghanistan.” 

Despite her successful intervention in Rahmat’s case, Hutchinson worries the women of Afghanistan have been forgotten by the international community. 

“In the early days, there were lots of folks doing this work, and I think we’re the last ones standing,” she says. 

Hutchinson would like to see Australia implement a humanitarian migration policy statement and a practical mechanism that prioritises women’s rights defenders still living under the Taliban. 

The existing criteria for priority processing recognises ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQI+ people and human rights defenders, but there is no additional support for those who are more vulnerable because they fit into more than one of these categories. 

“Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which is a whole of government policy document, talks about the need to protect women’s human rights defenders and to prioritise them in our humanitarian policies,” Hutchinson says. 

“This is something that should be happening – the humanitarian visa pathway is a humanitarian policy. 

“Just because the realpolitik of the world is interested in what’s going on in Ukraine and the situation in Gaza is horrendous, doesn’t mean that we should be forgetting about Afghanistan.” 

To work around the slow processing time for humanitarian visas, Azadi-e Zan is trying to make use of the skilled refugee labour agreement pilot scheme. This involves finding employers in areas with skills shortages that would be willing to hire women’s rights defenders on a two-year, full-time contract. The organisation is working with the ACT government to hire people in education support, health support and bus driver roles. 

Providing help to those who need it

Rahmat and her family finally settled in Sydney earlier this year. She credits the processing of her case to Hutchinson’s efforts. 

“We have moved from the horror of Afghanistan, which only smelled of death, and the bitter, dark days and nights of Pakistan to a bright future where there is comfort, peace and security,” Rahmat says. 

Now Rahmat wants to support her children and continue her own education. She hopes to “serve humanity” and is thinking of undertaking a PhD at ANU. 

She is not alone. In quiet moments, Hutchinson has met with other women she helped to reach Australia, and many have expressed a desire to help those who remain under the Taliban – a way to pay things forward.

“The strength of Afghan women is profound,” Hutchinson says. “Their ability to learn, study and stand strong blows me away every day, and I would like the world to see and recognise that. 

“So much of what our soldiers saw of Afghanistan is women under burqas. They didn’t see Afghan women in a glittering, traditional headdress that swirls when they twirl or with a fierce fist in the face of the Taliban.” 

Hutchinson also wants to help the networks of people she met during her military career. She now lives with a chronic, disabling illness and is mindful of what this would mean if she was in the kind of situation women like Rahmat have faced. 

“My illness means that if I was in their situation and my country or my city was taken over the way that theirs was, I would have died in that chaos. I would have needed someone to guide me and to help me,” Hutchinson says. 

“I may no longer be able to serve in the military or work full-time, or even run around the block, but I was able, in this day and age with apps, to still use my knowledge and skills and training to keep them safe in ways that I would have wanted someone to keep me safe. 

“And I think that is only fair, considering how cruel the world has been to the women of Afghanistan.”